Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category
Sep
30
2008
at 10:57am
This morning the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) launched a “do not call” service. Within hours the website was not available. The explaination:
“A spokesperson for the CRTC said the site ‘worked fine’ when it launched at midnight, and said she didn’t know what had caused it to freeze up.
She speculated that the number of people trying to access the site may have blocked access to some users
‘Try it later and cross your fingers,’ she said.”
They don’t know what happened???? “Cross your fingers”?? Did they not realize that when they announced this they’d be getting a flood of traffic? Had their web developers never heard of the Digg effect? Similar problem when you’re announcing a very attractive service in media outlets across the country.
What do do when things go wrong
- Find out what actually happened.
- Fess up. Admit that your systems weren’t able to handle the traffic (or whatever the problem was). Do not blame the users.
- Promise to get the site working ASAP.
- Do get the site working ASAP.
- In the future, make sure your servers can handle the traffic, or plan other ways to avoid the problem.
Posted in Usability | 6 Comments »
Sep
12
2008
at 1:56pm
The “chunky footer” is becoming a big trend in web design. This is a footer that is much bigger than what was traditionally used, often containing several sets of links and other information. Take a look at this flikr set for some examples.
Do you find these to be effective? I think from a design perspective they solve a lot of problems. Get a lot of links on the home page without cluttering the main interface.
The problem I find is that as a user I often miss them entirely. On Jason Santa Maria’s site it took me several visits before I even noticed it was there. Why? Because I didn’t scroll that far (on the actual articles there are often many comments, making the pages quite long. Most users wouldn’t read all those comments.)
What about my home page? Will people notice the Recent Posts block at the bottom? Will they think to scroll past the white? Granted, I was intentional in what I put there vs. what I put on the sidebar. It’s not exactly essential stuff.
Usability experts have found that users have learned to scroll (early usability research found that users wouldn’t scroll past the fold). But, do they scroll the whole page? Prioritizing Web Usability, Jacob Nielsen points out that users often won’t scroll further if they get the visual impression that there is no more content on the page. If users assume that the navigation ends with the top or left navigation bar, will they try looking further down for more links?
What do you think?
Posted in Design, Usability | 2 Comments »
Jun
20
2008
at 9:17am
I finally got around to trying out the local web server on my Mac today. At first I was quite impressed — it’s obvious from the default installation, everything is set up and ready to go, and they even include a handy quickstart index.html page*. How cool is that? Get newbies started with web page design. It even tells them how easy it is to create a web page.
Then I read this:
HTML is easy — so easy that even a first-time user can do it. That’s because you don’t have to learn HTML to use it.
Leading word processing applications, such as Microsoft Word and AppleWorks 6, actually generate HTML webpages for you with just a few clicks of a mouse.
Noooooooo….
* link only available while my work computer is on, which is only when I’m at work, or you can try this one.
Posted in Usability, Web Standards | 2 Comments »
Jun
05
2008
at 8:38am
I just got my new Thinkpad advanced dock (so I can hook my laptop up to my DVI monitors with a KVM switch. V. l33t 
). The docking station came with a users guide and a “Read This First” safety booklet. The problem is that the user’s guide includes about 13 languages and the safety booklet 34 languages. Do I need those languages? Of course not. It’s a waste of paper. And in this case it’s even worse because there aren’t separate sections for each language, it’s all mixed. You have to flip past all kinds of spanish and chinese to get to the English bits. The user’s guide also has about 6 pages of extra information for Turkey only.
What else could they do?
- Provide an language option when purchasing the product and only provide documentation in that language.
- Skip the paper documentation and provide a little card with a link to the download site. Nobody reads the documentation anyway, might as well save some trees.
And the worst part about it is that the user’s guide is mostly a bunch of bullshit. Thank you for purchasing this product blah blah blah, this is what it’s does, and this is what’s included in the package. Um, I bought the product I think I know what it does!
The connection instructions are on a separate poster with diagrams only, no words at all. I’m not sure which is worse.
The dock was also wrapped in molded syrofoam, unlike the LaCie external hard drive that arrived yesterday (not for me), which had egg carton like cardboard packaging. Boo to Lenovo (although I really like my laptop so I won’t criticize them too much!)
Posted in General, Usability | 4 Comments »
May
23
2008
at 2:02pm
I just came across a certain article on some drupal theming techniques that called itself a tutorial. What’s the problem? It didn’t actually teach (or tutor) anything. It simply gave you some code to copy and paste and told you where to paste it. How does that help?
People aren’t going to learn if you just give them the answers. This happens all the time in the forums –people post a question and someone comes along and gives them the code to paste in. That solves the problem but the poster doesn’t learn anything in the process.
With coding questions in particular I’ll often give people most of the answer, even writing out a step-by-step tutorial, but I won’t post the full code or a link to a working page. This way the user has to put things together themselves and figure out how things work. There was a really great post at Creating Passionate Users called “Cognitive Seduction and the “peekaboo” law”:
In learning, the more you fill things in and hold the learner’s hand, the less their brain will engage. If they don’t need to fire a single neuron to walk through the tutorial, lesson, lecture, etc., they’re getting a shallow, surface-level, non-memorable exposure of “covered” material, but… what’s the point?
(I totally love that blog. So sad that she’s no longer posting. It’s a must read if you’re interested in education and/or software development or something in between).
With the tutorial in question I came out with some samples of the code I would need to do something similar to what I really want to do. It doesn’t help me understand what those variables are doing and how I can use them in different ways. Not a tutorial.
See, it’s a short post for once. Aren’t you happy?
Posted in Usability, Writing | No Comments »
May
11
2008
at 11:13am
The much celebrated WordPress 2.5 upgrade was released about a month and a half ago and I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading my installation. I was really looking forward to the new Happy Cog designed admin interface. But guess what? I was disappointed.
The new design is surely nicer looking than the old (although I didn’t really have a problem with the old design). They’ve made quite a few interface changes – some good, some not so good. Read on to see some screenshots and analysis of the new interface.
Read more…
Posted in Design, Open Source, Software, Usability | 10 Comments »
